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'This paper explores stories of re-mapping the archives through art and poetic-prose, using ideas of haunting through ‘memory in the blood.’ Our family archives are like maps that haunt and guide us toward paths past-travelled and directions unknown. We travel through these archives that offer up new stories and collections of data, and a brutal surveillance is exposed at the hands of the State. We gain insight into intimate conversations, letters, behaviours and movements, juxtaposed with categorisations of people, places, landscapes and objects. These records are our memories and lives; material, visceral, flesh and blood. The State wounds and our records bleed. I travel through my own Nanna’s records and recognise that we have never lived outside the State, and this very act of recognition continues the wounding. State acts of surveillance, recording and archiving had the power to place our
family stories in the public domain, or obliterate stories within a broader history of erasure; filed away, silent and hidden until bidden. But our bodies too are archives where memories, stories, and lived experiences are stored, etched and anchored in our bloodlines deep. They ground our creativity in what become personal and political acts of remembering, identity making and speaking back to the State. Detective-like methods allow us to creatively re-map events and landscapes, piece together lives fragmented and heal our wounds.' ((Re) Mapping the Archive, 4)
Notes
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Epigraph:
It is the fever in the archive after all, the same fever that drives the hoarding (the holding) which might drive an attempt to touch something of the event. To feel this drive to touch is to be haunted by a possibility of something beyond (before, within) the archive. It is here that we contemplate whether or not that which we were approaching is actually approaching us. (Hawkes 206)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- Finding Ullagundahi Island 2001 single work novel
- The Aboriginal Sovereign Woman 2007 single work criticism
- The End in the Beginning : Re(de)finding Aboriginality : 1994 Wentworth Lecture 2003 single work essay
- Blood Language 2009 selected work prose
- Politics of Writing 2002 single work autobiography